While past research on the nature and causes of family violence contains a wealth of insights and findings, it also suffers from a lack of formal causal models linking phenomena inside the home (e.g., unemployment, presence of young children) and phenomena outside the home (e.g., actions of the criminal justice system, the availability of shelters) with the frequency and seriousness of domestic violence. We propose to build a set of causal models drawing on therapy from sociology and economics, gather data from interviews with the relevant parties (particularly victims) and from records kept by the criminal justice system, and test the causal hypothesis implied by our models. Depending on the data base, up to 1000 domestic violence incidents will be examined. Our conclusions should have important implications for our understanding of the causes of family violence and for the development of large-scale, systematic ameliorative interventions.